Before you start: Make sure you've
installed Kong — It should only take a minute!

In this section, you'll learn how to manage your Kong instance. First, we'll
have you start Kong in order to give you access to the RESTful Admin
interface, through which you manage your Services, Routes, Consumers, and more. Data sent
through the Admin API is stored in Kong's datastore (Kong
supports PostgreSQL and Cassandra).

1. Start Kong

Issue the following command to prepare your datastore by running the Kong
migrations:

$ kong migrations bootstrap [-c /path/to/kong.conf]

You should see a message that tells you Kong has successfully migrated your
database. If not, you probably incorrectly configured your database
connection settings in your configuration file.

Note: the CLI accepts a configuration option (-c /path/to/kong.conf)
allowing you to point to your own configuration.

2. Verify that Kong has started successfully

If everything went well, you should see a message (Kong started)
informing you that Kong is running.

By default Kong listens on the following ports:

:8000 on which Kong listens for incoming HTTP traffic from your
clients, and forwards it to your upstream services.

:8443 on which Kong listens for incoming HTTPS traffic. This port has a
similar behavior as the :8000 port, except that it expects HTTPS
traffic only. This port can be disabled via the configuration file.